Hi Richard, thanks for this post! Just a quick comment about your discussion of ex ante Pareto violations. You write:
What is really responsible for the issue here is that we permit individuals to differ in their attitudes to risk. It is because Ann and Bob differ in these attitudes that we can find a decision problem in which they both prudentially prefer one option to another, while the latter option is guaranteed to give greater total utility than the former.
That’s not quite true. Even if all individuals have the same (non-neutral) risk attitude, we can get cases where everyone prefers one option to another even though it guarantees a worse outcome (and not just by the lights of total utilitarianism). See my paper “Rank-Weighted Utilitarianism and the Veil of Ignorance,” section V.B.
Hi Richard, thanks for this post! Just a quick comment about your discussion of ex ante Pareto violations. You write:
That’s not quite true. Even if all individuals have the same (non-neutral) risk attitude, we can get cases where everyone prefers one option to another even though it guarantees a worse outcome (and not just by the lights of total utilitarianism). See my paper “Rank-Weighted Utilitarianism and the Veil of Ignorance,” section V.B.
Ah, thanks, Jake! That’s really helpful! I’ll make an edit now to highlight that.